Abstract
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology that allows computer networks to be more efficiently managed and controlled by providing a high level of abstraction and network programmability. Having powerful abstractions and programmability via a centralised network controller provides new potential improvements to computer networks, such as easier network management, faster innovation and reduced cost.SDN has been successfully applied in wide area and data centre networks, and has achieved a significant improvement in network performance and efficiency. However, using SDN to control network traffic in end-host devices has not been investigated thoroughly. The research presented in this thesis aims to address this gap and investigates the potential benefits of SDN for end-hosts. This thesis explores the feasibility of applying the SDN methodology to control network traffic on multi-homed end devices. The objective was to create a control mechanism by changing the network stack on the client in a way that is transparent to the application layer, the network infrastructure, and other hosts on the network. In contrast to other solutions such as MPTCP, which require a protocol stack upgrade on all the participating nodes, the approach presented in this thesis allows quick and easy client-side-only deployment.This thesis presents an architecture for embedding SDN components, i.e. the SDN controller and switch, on multi-homed devices, and its use for traffic control. The simultaneous use of multiple network interfaces was explored and utilised for the implementation and evaluation of various load balancing algorithms.In order to do effective load balancing, it is important to know the state of the various host interfaces and related links, in particular the link capacity. To enable this, the thesis also presents an approach to monitor and measure link capacity, which is tightly integrated with the SDN traffic control architecture. For this purpose, the method of Variable Packet size (VPS) probing was adapted to work in the SDN context on end-hosts.The approach of SDN-based traffic control and load balancing was extensively evaluated for two specific use cases, web traffic and Voice over IP (VoIP), considering different transport layer protocols. Our experimental evaluation has shown the feasibility of the proposed method, and has demonstrated its potential for improving the Quality of Experience (QoE) for endusers. The experiments have shown that our SDN-based approach can even outperform MPTCP, even though MPTCP has the advantage of controlling both end points of the communication.
Published Version
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